CIA report now on to White House
By: Burgess Everett and Josh Gerstein June 23, 2014 07:43 PM EST

The Obama administration is inching toward declassification of the Senate’s report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s controversial interrogation techniques.

The CIA has finished redacting sensitive information from a 500-page summary of the 6,800-page report that the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to make public in April, Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in an interview Monday night.

Now it’s up to President Barack Obama and his close aides to finish the job and black out items in the report if, according to their view, national security could be jeopardized if those items were published. From there, the committee can publicly release the report.

“The CIA has finished the redaction. The report’s at the White House, and we should have it sometime during the summer,” Feinstein said.

Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the CIA, confirmed that the agency had completed “initial recommendations on redactions for the purposes of classification.”

The administration is bracing for the possibility that the release of the report could spark blowback against diplomats, U.S. troops and even U.S. allies.

White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the administration would work to declassify the report as quickly as it can within the confines of national security.

“The president has been clear that he wants this process completed as expeditiously as possible, and he’s also been clear that it must be done consistent with our national security,” Hayden said. “Prior to the release of any information related to the former [Rendition, Detention and Interrogation] program, the administration will also need to look at any potential security implications and take a series of steps to prepare our personnel and facilities overseas. We will do that in a timely fashion.”

While Feinstein has been pushing the administration to move as quickly as it can, she had no qualms Monday about the pace.

“It’s the best we can do,” she said.

When made public, the report is expected to provide an embarrassing and graphic look at the CIA’s secret prisons and interrogation techniques during the presidency of George W. Bush. The report cost millions to ultimately put together and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Democrats spent five years researching it, investigating the treatment of dozens of detainees and the waterboarding and “stress position” tactics used to glean information from the prisoners.

Obama has publicly issued support for declassifying the summary of the report on enhanced interrogation techniques — “torture” to CIA critics — and Democratic senators have been pressing Obama and his team to move swiftly since April, but the process is taking longer to play out than originally expected.

The CIA has indicated to Feinstein that declassification could be done by July 4. Last week, the CIA said in a status report the latest the document will be available is Aug. 29.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), a former Intelligence Committee chairman, said the declassification process has strained relations between the committee and the administration’s intelligence apparatus. The CIA has accused the committee of removing an internal interrogation review from its facilities — and Feinstein has charged that the CIA erred in removing that document from the committee’s computers.

“There’s a code of silence. And it stems from the redaction of this enhanced interrogation, torture report,” Rockefeller said of congressional relations with the CIA.